“In essence, grace is anything that helps us truly open – our minds, our bodies, our emotions, our hearts. Sometimes grace is soft and beautiful. It appears as insight. It comes as a sudden understanding, or maybe just the blossoming of our hearts, the breaking open of our emotional bodies in a deeper way, so that we can feel more deeply and connect with what is and with each other in a deeper way. Grace can also be quite fierce. There are times in life that are very, very trying. At the time, grace might be hard to recognize, but as we think back to these powerful times in our lives, we can start to see the great gift that was received.

“I remember hearing a talk from a very famous Tibetan teacher. He was crippled, and so he couldn’t use either one of his legs. He told how a big boulder fell on his legs and broke them, and he spent many years in a stone hut, because there was really nothing that he could do. It was hard for someone with broken legs to get around much in the Himalayas. He said, ‘To be locked in that small hut for so many years was the greatest gift that ever happened to me. It was a great grace, because if it wasn’t for that, I would never have turned within. So I look back at the losing of my legs as one of the most profound and lucky events of my whole life.’

“… When we tell God what we want God to do, or we tell the universe what we want it to do, we’re not really opening ourselves up yet – we’re still speaking from an egoic place. But when we confess our deepest heart’s yearning and tell the divine that we are inviting it to give us anything we need to awaken, we very well might get it. To open ourselves to this grace, to this flow of truth, means that we have to step out of ourselves. We have to let go of the illusion that we are in control of our life. When we hand it over, we’ll find ourselves falling into grace, falling into this clarity and openness and love, falling right into the grace of awaking from separation, where we realize our true spiritual essence: this beautiful unknown, unborn presence which manifests as everything we see.